ABSTRACT
While the emergence of early cinema has sometimes been thought of as having resulted from a technological breakthrough, the seventh art owes its existence to a wide variety of other modern technologies, spectacles, genres and modes of display. One of the goals of this volume is to seek to better understand how photography, painting, serial narrative and the realist novel, the popular press, wax museums and other visual innovations such as the diorama, the panorama and the kinetoscope shaped modes of observation employed by Spain's modern citizens. Modernity cannot be conceived outside the context of the city, which provided an arena for the circulation of goods, the exchange of glances, and the exercise of consumerism. Between 1896 and 1910, however, before the dreams of the urban planners and investors for the Gran Via had been fully realized, the vast majority of spaces where films were shown were not designed with film viewing in mind.
